How I Learned Guitar

In my early years of teaching guitar I did not really push the issue of practice. I believed that students were either motivated or they were not. To be honest, as a guitarist making a living from teaching, I was afraid if I pushed students to practice too hard many would just quit. Unfortunately, being…

Many parents struggle with getting their child to do guitar practice mostly because they make it complicated. There is in fact a very simple way to motivate your child to practice but it may not be what you were hoping for. You see there is this common held misconception that children should have a passion…

Learning to play guitar is really about developing the habit of deliberate practice. Deliberate practice by definition is when you practice with an awareness of what you are practicing and why. This might seem obvious but far too often we do what I call ‘mindless practice’. This is where you practice while thinking about what you…

When you look at Li-sa-X for example its obvious she practices for many hours a day and loves doing it but why? Basically there is a connection between the practice of anything you care to name and an eventual love of the thing being practiced. There is this point where we tip and the love…

It seems we all know of at least one legendary coach who has an amazing record. I have spent decades researching the best ways to learn and teach guitar. This led me to reading about great coaches and teachers in various fields such as sport, education, business and personal development. When you look at the records…

To receive a FREE copy of the G4 GUITAR METHOD please follow the link below. Make no mistake Learning guitar is challenging. At a guess around 90% of people who take up guitar end up quitting in the first year. My 30+ years of experience teaching guitar has shown me that it doesn’t have…

Coach Bill Walsh of the 49ers took his team from last on the ladder to first in just 3 years. The fastest turn around in the history of the game. He achieved this remarkable feat by implementing what he called his ‘standard of performance’. The first stage was discipline. For example players could not sit…

In this article I am going to talk about two of the most important elements to successful practice of a musical instrument. If you can embrace and incorporate these two elements into your daily practice you will progress faster and with less effort compared to most music students. The 10,000 Hour Rule is Untested K….

First, let’s define success on guitar. Success to me is practicing 5 to 7 days a week with a record of doing it for at least 254 days which I will explain below. The practice must be quality practice, not simply noodling or doing what you can already do. You should be working on challenging…

There is a common belief that one on one private lessons are better than group lessons. This is based on the idea that teaching several students at one time means each student gets less attention. Such logic is not based on evidence but is instead, just assumed. The fact is the evidence as I discovered, is…

But hang on a minute. Aren’t successful people positive thinkers? Weren’t we told that self fulfilling prophecies determined our outcomes? Well it turns out that a sign of a successful person is someone who is usually quietly expecting to fail. They don’t want to fail of course and its certainly not their plan to fail…

Mastering guitar isn’t just about learning how to fingerpick and memorise chords. You will also need to learn the language, and that means new vocabulary and terminology. To make sure you don’t get confused, TakeLessons teacher Matt K. put together this list of essential guitar terms to get you started. Keep this infographic handy (in your room…